At the beginning of “Colony,” Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) is stuck in a terrible predicament: Before she spends the next two hours on the run from zombies, she’ll have to rely on her ex-husband for a job.
While sitting at a tech conference, listening to the CEO of the biotech company Chains Bio talk about how humanity’s future lies in something called collective intelligence, Se-jeong is biting her tongue, less than enthused that she needs her ex’s help. She’s got the look of someone who isn’t afraid to speak her mind – always halfway to an eye roll, and uncaring if people can sense her distaste. As the CEO drones on about how one day, humanity will be mentally linked, and you won’t even be able to think bad thoughts about someone in front of them without them knowing, you can’t help but get the sense that that’s a future Se-jeong could not abide.
Gyu-sung (Go Soo), her ex, tells her it’s her own fault she’s in this situation. Se-jeong previously worked in academia, and had no qualms calling out her dean for his bad behavior – even if it got her fired. But Gyu-sung doesn’t care that the dean was a jerk – he thinks she should have been able to grin and bear it.
“You keep doing things that make people hate you,” he tells her bluntly.
“Colony” is a zombie movie from South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho, best known for his other film, “Train to Busan.” Both are zombie movies, and both feature social commentary, but “Colony” is a little mixed in its execution. It’s trying to make a point about how society – South Korean and otherwise – treats women who dare to bring to light the ills of men in power. But, while that allegory is admirable, it’s stretched a bit thin over the film’s actual plot. And the zombies, while interesting in theory, aren’t quite enough to distract from that fact.
Before we meet Se-jeong and Gyu-sung, we meet our villain, the scientist Seo Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan), as he calls the police and tells them that he plans to unleash a bio-terrorist attack in the skyscraper where the conference is taking place. As the police race to find him, we meet some of the other characters who will eventually team up with Se-jeong and Gyu-sung against the zombie attack – characters like Hyun-seok (Ji Chang-wook), a security guard, and his wheelchair-bound sister Hyun-hee (Kim Shin-rok).
As Young-chul, Koo is “Colony’s” most interesting component. In addition to releasing the virus into the building, he also injects himself with the vaccine, rendering himself necessary and therefore unkillable. The “real” villain in zombie movies is almost always “humanity,” but at its most interesting, “Colony” nails it down to one guy – and what a smug bastard he is.
Koo plays Young-chul as cocky as can be. At one point, our group of survivors capture him, intending to escape with him and bring him to the authorities. As they map out what to do, he outright laughs at their plans for escape, eavesdropping on their conversations and smiling coyly, ready to use whatever information he gleans useful for later. He’s maniacal (punchable, petty) in a way that your typical zombie movie (gritty, gore-focused) doesn’t often have time for.
That makes for an interesting flavor in a movie that otherwise is pretty standard. The zombies themselves are quite mesmerizing, their penchant for collective evolution (there’s that collective intelligence thing rearing its ugly head) and imitation very unsettling – at one point, when Hyun-seok starts carrying Hyun-hee around on his back, the zombies start to climb each other like trees. But “Colony” doesn’t necessarily take advantage of what it has, particularly when it comes to its action scenes. Theoretically, our survivors are stuck in an enclosed space, but that space is large enough that it’s hard to orient yourself as a viewer, and Yeon doesn’t take advantage of the space he does have. Barring a few startling moments, the continuous sequences of sneaking around followed by total bombardment start to feel a little monotonous.
While “Colony” can be entertaining, its plot can also get rather sweaty. Multiple characters are made to explain away strange plot mechanics, but in ways that only make you think about their strangeness more. There’s a lot of talk about why the survivors have to get to the rescue team instead of the rescue team coming to them (which, I thought was the point of a rescue team), but just because you have characters say something a lot doesn’t mean it makes a lot of sense.
The allegory about women having to make hard choices – like ratting out their jerky bosses and facing public ostracization – also gets really thin by the film’s end. Se-jeong begins working with her ex-husband’s new wife, Seol-hee (Shin Hyun-been), a biotechnologist working to stop the outbreak from the outside, and they both come to a realization about how the zombies can be stopped for good. The problem is, this solution will also rid them of the vaccine. The two women are faced with a choice that the movie wants you to think is impossible: stop the outbreak and temporarily lose the vaccine, or allow the outbreak to continue.
Just as she was willing to call out the dean (which is revealed to have a larger connection to the plot, further complicating the film’s allegory), Se-jeong is willing to take one for the team, stopping the zombie apocalypse even if it means … everyone will hate her for doing so? Despite its best efforts, “Colony” can’t convince its audience that anyone would hate Se-jeong for making the choice that she does. When faced with the realities of the plot – the end of the world, the onset of the age of zombies – the allegorical thread the film wants to follow starts to disintegrate.
